Did you know that if you have an apple TV and an iPad you can have a fireplace where you don’t have a fireplace? This is too cool. I found a fireplace video on youtube and used AirPlay to send it to my apple TV. It crackles and glows and makes the basement feel all toasty.
Bring your hot toddy and join me.
BTW, this is not an ad for apple stuff. I’m just glad I have this stuff on hand from before the layoff because there’s no more DiSH. Soooo, not trying to be an elitist snob or anything and the apple TV is cheap anyway.
The Confluence 
I just got back from knitting night at the library. I’ve poured myself a nice Port Wine (from a bottle — a Trader Joe’s brand) … I might have found my new drink.
Any word about how Occupy Iowa went?
I was watching the results on C-span. It looked like Romney, Santorum and Paul in a dead heat after about 100 caucuses had phoned in. I smell skullduggery. Romney should have won this. I’m wondering if Obama’s fanbase isn’t going to the caucuses and boosting Paul’s and Santorum’s numbers just to drag the process out.
The basterds.
Yeah, but then couldn’t Occupy have a bigger impact on the Dem Caucuses?
possibly
I have to go back to C-Span to check progress.
I vote for the Lunatic Fringe making a big showing at the caucuses. No skulduggery needed.
If Obama’s fanbase are reregistering R to vote for Santorum/Paul in order to set back Romney to Obama’s later advantage . . . wouldn’t that be all-the-more reason for Obama’s anti-fan hate-base to reregister R to UPvote Romney to Obama’s later disadvantage? It would just add one more reason to my current list of reasons to reregister R to vote for Romney in a primary or caucus. As if I didn’t already have all the reasons I need . . .
Political scientists could try studying who voted how. I suspect that
the Iowa R results merely reflect the strong bias among Iowa’s caucus voting Christian R voters for Rapturanian Armageddonite Dominionist CLAN fascism. Its who they are. Its what they do. No Obama voters in drag are needed.
These are the people who voted for Robertson over Poppy Bush and Huckabee over others in past caucuses, for example, without any distracting Obama voters-in-drag to confuse the results. Its just how Iowa’s RightWingers roll.
BTW, I figured out a homemade yogurt recipe after a few trials. To make it, you need one of those european yogurt makers . You can use any device you want actually but this makes 7 little jars of yogurt or one big bowl. They’re not too expensive and if you eat a lot of yogurt, it will pay for itself in a couple of months.
Here’s how to do it:
Equipment:
yogurt maker
7 jars plus lids
1 small bowl
1 pitcher
1 whisk
1 spoon
1 measuring cup
1 measuring spoon set
Ingredients:
1 1-liter box of UHT 2% milk (Parmalat or Hersheys)
1 cup of Fage 2% plain greek yogurt
1/2 cup nonfat dry milk
2 teaspoons plain gelatin
Directions:
Clean all equipment. Wash hands thoroughly. Boil a kettlesworth of water on the stove. Pour boiling water all over equipment (except yogurt maker) before starting. Make sure you rinse every surface with boiling water. Empty water from equipment. Do not towel dry unless you have a super clean towel. After this step, you want to work quickly to prevent contamination. Do not allow the stirring equipment to touch any surfaces except the ones you just cleaned. Do not set the spoon on the counter, for example. Usually I’m not this fanatical about food but yogurt is different and goes into an incubator so bateria can cook and you don’t want any stray bacteria cooking in there. So be careful.
Set up jars in the yogurt maker and plug it in. Put the lids in a small plastic bag and set the bag aside.
In the small bowl, add 2 teaspoons of gelatin and about 1/4 cup UHT milk. Stir to incorporate with the spoon. Pour the rest of the UHT milk into pitcher. Add nonfat dry milk. Stir until nonfat milk is completely disolved. Add cup of Fage yogurt to pitcher. Use whisk to break up the yogurt. Whisk until all of the yogurt is incorporated and there are no lumps. Add the gelatin-milk mixture to the pitcher. Whisk everything together thoroughly. Pour the milk-yogurt mixture into the jars of the yogurt maker. You will have some leftovers. Not sure how to avoid this without carefully measuring milk and yogurt and then having too little of either leftover to do anything useful. So, if you’re in the mood for experimenting, find another container, pour the stuff into it and leave it on the counter overnight. See what happens. Does it turn to yogurt without heat? If you refrigerate it afterwards, how long does it take before it gets funky?
Turn on the yogurt maker and set the automatic timer for 10 hours. When you wake up the next day, cap the jars and chill to set completely. Your yogurt will be rich and creamy but not too firm. Serve with fruit or honey or make raita or whatever frosts your crockies.
The one thing I would change about this recipe is that the product is not completely uniform. The bottom layer of yogurt is thicker than the top. When I was in the lab, we had incubators that constantly shook the contents of the flasks. For some weird reason ecoli like to be jostled around while cooking. It probably makes a more uniform growth environment. Anyway, if I were a yogurt maker, I’d incorporate some vibrational or shaking device. Maybe it wouldn’t have to shake continuously. Maybe once every 15 minutes or so would work. But it would have to be vigorous enough to stir up the contents of the jar from the bottom up. Just a thought. Wait, maybe I ought to try to patent that…
Back in the days when I ate yogurt, I would have LOVED this recipe! Sadly, I can’t be trusted with it anymore. It’s too much like ice cream to me these days and better not to have at all.
Really? I’m pretty lactose intolerant but yogurt doesn’t bother me at all. Anyway, if it’s the fat content, you can always do nonfat everything. It just takes a longer incubation time and the taste is supposed to be a bit tangier. This recipe will make lowfat yogurt but it tastes richer because of the nonfat dry milk.
No, I mean I LOVE it — to have it in the house to to gobble it all up at once. I’m a total yogurt pig. I dream of being lactose intolerant
If it’s low fat and low calorie, wouldn’t that be not-a-problem anyway?
Not if you eat 3 cups in one sitting. I’m the same way around almonds. You can’t leave them anywhere near me. I will eat them non-stop until they are gone. I can’t help myself.
Just design an agitator-platform that will fit and hold most of the brands of yogurt makers on the market and you have your yogurt maker shaker right there. I have no idea how to design it of course.
But if such a thing could be designed to fit and agitate/stir the yogurt makers already out there . . . so that millions of yogurt maker owners would only have to buy it as an “after-market add-on” rather than as a whole new piece of replacement equpiment . . . then I should think it would be very appealing and sellable and patentable.
That’s my lay amateur suggestion.
Speaking of no more dish, did they ask why you were canceling?
If it was me I would have told them it’s because you can’t get a package that excludes Fox and MSNBC.
i told them I wanted to reduce my expenses and I wasn’t using my Dish subscription very much so it was the logical thing to cut. All true. Also, it was very expensive.
Then they told me they would give me a $5 break. I laughed. I was spending a fortune. Five bucks was a drop in the bucket. Then they said they could give me a less expensive package but none of the stuff I actually watch would be in it (no AMC, HBQ, Showtime, HGTV, stuff like that). I asked them if they could give me a package with no Fox. They said no. Then I said, ok, so you’re going to give me exactly what I don’t want and none of the things I do want. Yes, they said, how does that sound? I said it didn’t sound so hot. They said they hated to lose me as a customer. Then why don’t you offer ala carte selections, I asked? Why am I subsidizing programming that only stupid people watch? They didn’t have an answer for that. So, they said they would send me some boxes to return the DVRs.
Good for you, if more people canceled because the providers won’t offer ala carte programming they might get the hint. I would love to have a cable or dish service sans Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and Bloomberg.
I wish I could get it with no ESPN or those sirius radio stations, I actually watch msnbc for morning joe and fox during democratic primaries. It is the only time and place to get relatively unbiased or at least balanced opinions. Fox hates all democrats equally and Morning Joe is the only place where Hillary got any respect at all even though they did have the guts to tell the truth about what was going on.
that should be they did not have the guts to tell the whole truth about what was happening to her.
All true, but I can get msnbc stuff on my apple TV through the podcasts. I don’t have to pay for it and I don’t have to subsidize Fox News.
How many people would it take dropping cable or dish to force the cabledish industry to offer a strictly a la carte model? Would that many people be willing to drop dishcable and go without it to force that change in cabledish monopolist policy?
It may be a matter of long term legal contracts. Also, the cable industry has been fighting the reality of new technology kicking and screaming. In a way, it reminds me of the music industry before iTunes.
They’d better get with the program. With a Roku box or apple TV you can get just about everything you want to see ala carte now. You just have to pay for them. I’ll bet the premium channels are going to be the first to blink. And NO I don’t want to pay for Fox News. I don’t care how many people watch it. Why should we want to help pay for poison?
Maybe off topic: I’m enjoying watching so many of the Hullabazoo denizens come unglued over the possibility of Obummer losing. 😈
If you want to make them come even more unglued, you might post a comment about how if millions of DDs (Disgruntled Democrats) were to reregister R to vote for Romney and get Romney nominated . . . that
Obama’s defeat-chances would be measurably increased.
The unglueage would spread like cracks propagating
catasrophically through a severely fatigued airplane’s outer skin.
(Unless you too have been stealth-banned from Hullabaloo. And if Digby says you haven’t been banned and she has no idea how that happened . . . well now . . . is that really believable? I mean . . . have you ever heard of a blog-program set to ban people at random without further post-programming intervention? Me neither.)
If I happen to find myself at an unbanned computer, I will make that suggestion in a Guest comment, and if it stays up long enough for you and the other readers to see it, you can measure the unglueage that ensues. I would note that even from unbanned computers, Digby’s vealpen police seem to be very vigilant and very swift. I made a comment under my own nom d’blog from an unbanned computer and it was gone half a day later. Perhaps if I had called myself Guest, it might have stayed up longer . . . )
Hmmm, I make comments there all of the time under my own name. I can really ping the commenters too. Yesterday someone accused me of not caring that 4000 troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan because I said I was more concerned with the economy right now as the best way to end the wars. What an obnoxious little twerp. I imagined he was about 22 years old and had just enough information to make him look silly. I had to point out to him that my brother is in the army and is now stationed in Kuwait with frequent forays into Afghanistan and Iraq. I guess if my brother is not a 20 something he doesn’t count. I wanted to spank him.
I used to as well. Then I got stealth-banned, along with Che Pasa and Sarah B. and possibly others. It happened shortly after I and others cross-post-commented about-and-to Crawdad Hole’s posting about stealth disappearing of comments shortly after Atkins’s arrival.
In particular, it began with a silent removal of a comment by someone called Vast Left.
I got banned shortly after I said “call me paranoid, but I will be watching.” I think it was “somebody’s” way of saying: “oh no you won’t.” Perhaps “somebody” knows they would create some trouble for themselves by banning you, because how would “somebody” explain banning the proprietor of The Confluence? Whereas R U Reddy was clearly just some noisy nobody who could be banned without repercussions . . . like Che Pasa and Sarah B. and perhaps others.
Well, I went over to H-loo to find the most recent spooniepost and smell the melting unglue. He got 309 comments . . . so H-loo still has lots of readers. And I notice that Che Pasa was there with a comment, so if he indeed was stealth-banned along with Sarah B. and myself, he has been unbanned since.
Noted in all fairness.
are they still in love with Obama over there? Really?
Romney, Santorum, Paul……. Joe Scarborough says he thinks Santorum could beat Obama and he might be right. Scary, love him or hate him Santorum is the real deal to grass roots christian conservatives. He is not so loved by small government conservatives. But if he were the nominee they would vote for him.
Yesterday I was accused of being right wing because I objected to ripping apart the only women in the race based on her religion. I guess I just don’t see the point. Next to Santorum she seems like a decent person, she has taken in a lot of foster children, she’s nice to seniors etc. I can’t stand her stand on abortion and homosexuality, (or much of anything else) but it is no worse than most of the male candidates and she is not going to be the nominee, Santorum might be the nominee. But at least we on the left beat the hell out of the crazy bi*ch woman over the last couple of months. Makes me so proud to be a woman in the democratic party.
Oh well, I like Huntsman, so of course he can’t possibly be the nominee.
If you like the idea of accelerating the export of jobs to China, by all means, vote for Huntsman.
I find Huntsman preferable to Santorum, Newt or Mittens. Call me crazy, I can’t really deny it.
Type Rick Santorum Penn Hills School district in your favorite search engine and read the resulting articles to get a glimpse into his morality.
Doing well in a fundie red state is no indicator on how he would do in the general election. Although as bad as Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have been stinking up the joint …
Omg! Did Santorum graduate from Penn Hills HS? That’s where I went to school.
I know all about the Penn Hills school district thing. Santorum was my senator….funny thing is, he was replaced by someone who I consider not much better. But the powers that be in the democratic party, all of whom are male, decided that they didn’t give a sh*t about his conservative religious views and shoved him down our throats anyway. What were we going to do, vote for Santorum? Thank you Chucky Schumer.
Did you know you can do the same thing without one single Apple appliance?
but that wouldn’t be elitist enough……ONLY KIDDING!!!
RD, when I was on a rant about elitism in the whole OWS Walmart debacle, I really did not mean you personally. I just so want the movement to grow and to work for the 99 percent, the whole 99 percent. And I know that it can not if it turns off 85 percent of the people. Union advisers would help, but even at that unions no longer represent the will of most of Americans. Seems like the movement needs two more types of advisers, populist lower middle class and middle class professional who have suddenly fallen in to the ranks of the poor.
I disagree. We don’t need to separate ourselves into strata. That’s probably what the 1% would like. Dividing us and making us feel like one group of people is superior to the other works into their plans quite well. Let’s create resentment. Let’s make the middle class people who are suddenly poor feel like their membership is only temporary.
We have to see ourselves as united against the 1% because they make no distinctions.
I am not saying separate people, I am saying understand they people that you have not yet pulled in to the movement. You don’t create a movement to help the 99 percent when most of the 99 percent think you are annoying. They don’t see what you have to do with them when you are beating drums, sleeping in parks and stopping them from doing their thing on black Friday.
Probably. But since I already have the apple stuff on hand, I don’t really need to do anything else.
if OWS wanted to make a big impact they could show up at all the primaries and caucuses and vote democratic for “undeclared”. That alone would fill me with hope for change.
We can do that too in our local state primaries and caucuses.
Speaking of Apple appliances, the missus got the daughter one of those budget store I-Pod chargers for x-mas. She plugged it in and heard a pop and now owns an expensive paper weight.
On way to solve the looming health care crisis?
Start using medical appliances made in China.
Take the iPod to an apple genius. Tell him your iPod brokeded and you don’t know why. Act innocent. Well, you *don’t* know why, do you? Are you a physicist? Do you remember Maxwell’s equations? It could be any of a number of reasons. That’s why they’re the geniuses. He/she will examine the entrails and if the iPod is still under warranty, give you a replacement. Sometimes the replacement is a refurbished unit. You’ll probably never know the difference.
Medical devices made in China? Would they work any better than the high-sulfur gypsum sheetrock made in China? Or the lead paint toys made in China? Or the poison petfood made in China? Or the
poisoned honey imported from China? (Google “China honey laundering” to see what comes up).
But in all fairness, many things made in China are good quality now.
Good quality at slave wages. Put enough American medical device makers out of work and they will become too poor to afford healthcare
with devices made in China either. That’s what “race to the bottom” means.
I thought you said 1 litter box…
Lol! Crunchy yogurt.
Good Morning!! I don’t know if it’s last night’s port .. but I’m moving pretty slow this morning.
Ha! I was at the gym this morning for a 9am abs class followed by and hour of step interval. I can’t believe I used to do this 4 times a week. I could barely keep up. That’s what throwing your back out last summer and unemployment will do to you. It’s hard to get the blood pumping. Half way through the class I decided to bag the step and just do everything on the floor. Maybe next week I’ll make it all the way through.
Betcha it’s going to be a sore tomorrow.
I’m going to try to stop by my Community Center a couple of times a week. If I can do that then It would pay to get a month pass to go as often as I want…. AND if I went most days (4 or more) then it would pay to get a 3 month pass…. then it would be spring. (the whole issue starts again in the summer)
A couple of sites that let you help people for free.
Free Rice: http://www.freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/1466
The Hunger Site: http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1
Monster from the Id,
Re above subthreadlet, is Spooniepoo becoming unglued his own self? Is he becoming un glued?
Wait, I’m getting tired. I meant the second question to read: is he getting . . . shrill?
Riverdaughter,
Further thinking about an agitation-function for a yogurt maker led me to these thoughts . . .
Perhaps you could invent from the ground up a yogurt maker with built-in agitation. If Ron Popeil and his RonCo Inc. still exist, perhaps
you could sell your yogurt shaker maker through his mighty advertising and sales network. It could be called The YogurMatic, with
Dynamic Agitation! The same Dynamic Agitation Technology only available in advanced research laboratories until now ! . . .
The ads just write themselves.